Tuesday 9 December 2014

Christmas Pressies for Writers

Yes, I know it's already the 9th December, and you're probably so organised you have all of your shopping done already...
...or you could be like the rest of us who are thinking "I really need to get the present shopping started!" and frantically scratching your head at what to get everyone.

Well, I am here to help!  For the writers in your family at least.  (For everyone else go for socks.  Everyone loves socks.  Well... I love socks.)

So without further ado, here's your list of great gift ideas for the writer in your life!

Tuesday 2 December 2014

Half Full

One of the fun things about writing is to set yourself challenges that may not be your usual style.

I entered the Nikon European Film Festival this year with a script I wrote called "Half Full".  The theme of the festival is "A Different Perspective".  Once I'd read that theme this conversation popped into my head, and so we spent a couple of days filming, and a few more days editing and sent off our submission.

You can check out the finished film here, and if you like it, give us a vote! :)

I'm proud of the way it turned out - I like the script and I think the film is not at all bad considering there were only three of us making it!  (Hence me ending up acting in it - that was something out of my comfort zone, but I gave it my best shot!)

Enjoy!

Tuesday 25 November 2014

November and Novels

November is the novel writing month - and whenever it comes around it seems I've always just finished a project (so yay for that!) and start another saying "perhaps this year I'll do that novel writing in a month thing"... and I of course get well carried away into a huge project that will not be finished by next week.

But I guess it's a good thing to get started on new things anyway.

In other news, my fantasy novel got proofread, spell-checked and packaged up to send to a publisher... and yesterday I got my first rejection postcard.  So ok, it would have been amazing to get a publisher on the first try, and I didn't expect it.  But I did hope a bit.

Still half of this game is finding the right person for the story, so away it's gone again, and we'll see how this one goes.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about blogging and decided that one of the problems of having a writing blog is that there just isn't that much to say about writing.  Sure I could repeat what other writers have already said about how to write, or lecture you on the rules of grammar (my proofreaders would probably find that funny, at least!) but when it comes down to it writing is mostly: 1) Thinking about stuff.  2) Typing.

As for talking about what I've written, well I will be doing that when it's ready to see, but until then there doesn't seem much point in building up excitement for something that you can't get yet, else everyone will have probably forgotten about it anyway by the time you can get it.

So instead I'll just put up doodles or something.  Enjoy.


Wednesday 27 August 2014

A Wild Book Appears



It is weird seeing your book printed out for the first time.  You know you’ve written a lot of words, but to see the chunk of paper that it takes up really brings it home.

You hold it, hefting its weight and think “finally, it’s done.”

But of course, it’s not done.  It’s nowhere near done.

At this point I’d like to thank to my test readers, who each took away a small tree’s worth of paper and spent their free time reading those words that I’ve written.  Your feedback has been great – and I’ve been happy to hear that you all enjoyed the book despite those spelling and grammatical errors which I managed to read over a hundred times and not spot.

I’ve had the recent task of going through that feedback – correcting those spellings, removing those extra commas… (well some of them – there is an ongoing debate about the use of the Oxford comma!) and in some cases rewriting scenes to add a little more depth or clarity.

Some of it has been fun (some typos created some very unintentionally funny sentences), some has been frustrating (we all have days where we just can’t think of a different way to phrase something), but overall it has been rewarding to see the story having the rough edges knocked off.

Not much more work to do before I try my hand at sending it out to publishers.  It’s hard to know when it’s ready, because as the saying goes “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.” 
It’s scary, but I guess I’ll just have to send it and see what happens.

Friday 17 January 2014

Women Destroy Science Fiction

I stumbled upon this announcement for a special edition of LIGHTSPEED featuring women who write Sci-Fi.  Or rather, destroy it.  Intriguing!

I have always loved Sci-Fi.  I can’t even remember the first time I watched Star Wars, because I was so young.  I grew up on Star Trek: the Next Generation, Buck Rogers re-runs, Thundercats, Ulysses 31… the list goes on.  At the same time I was playing video games, which quite often put me in the pilot seat of a Sci-Fi adventure.  I wanted my own lightsaber and X-Wing.  (I have them after a fashion now, so yay me!)

I’d like to say that when I wrote The Eye of theBeholder, I just wrote it and didn’t have any doubts about how it would be received based on my gender, but sadly that just isn’t true.  I can’t remember where I heard it, but I was vaguely aware of the idea that a Science Fiction book with a woman’s name on the cover would be more easily dismissed than if it had a man’s name on.

For a very short while I pondered about publishing under a male pen name.

There is a famous author from my home town you may have heard, of called George Eliot.  There is a statue of her in the town centre.  Yep, you read that right; her.  George’s real name was Mary Anne Evans.  She didn’t publish her work under that name for fear that it wouldn’t be taken seriously. 
Her most famous book is probably Middlemarch; published in 1872, and now recognised as “one of the greatest novels of the English language.”

1872.

That is over one hundred and forty years ago.

One hundred and forty years, and I had the same fear.  Wow.

I decided to go with my real feminine name (No one is going to mistake a “Sarah” for a guy like you might with a “Sam” or an “Ash”) for several reasons, but the primary one was that I wanted people to know a woman could write Sci-Fi.  It wouldn’t be fair for people to read the stories, enjoy them, and then credit them to a guy and perpetuate the myth that woman don’t write good Sci-Fi.  Thus far, I’m not aware of anyone passing up my book because of the name on the cover, but then I wouldn’t know if they did!

Likewise, I want girls to be able to read Sci-Fi, to see that it is an okay and normal thing for a girl to do.  I’ve come up against that myth far more:  People telling others my book is “for boys” because of the Science Fiction themes in it.  There are male characters in my stories, but there are also female characters, and there is even one story that features a spaceship as the main “character”!
I hope that if a girl sees a female name on the cover of the book, they will realise that women are equally allowed to enjoy the genre; it’s not an entirely male dominated thing.

How did the George Eliot story end?  Well, she admitted to being the novelist that the pubic had become so interested in; and she didn’t lose her fanbase because of it.  Would she have had the same initial success if they had known she was a woman from the start, or would they have passed her books over in search of a “proper” story merely because of the name?  No one can say.

Well, I’ve got a short story on the go to submit to this edition of LIGHTSPEED.  I don’t know if I’ll be lucky enough to get published or not.  I hope there will be plenty of women submitting their stories, even if that means a lot of competition! ;) At the end of it all, it’s about having fun and enjoying the genre we love.  It’s okay for people not to like the stories, as long as they do so on the basis of the writing, not on the irrelevant fact that the person writing it is female.

So for men and women around the globe who love good Sci-Fi, I’d ask you to check out this Kickstarter and offer your support, either monetarily or with a Share, so we women can destroy what Sci-Fi is seen to be, and join in on what Sci-Fi is all about; exploration, discovery and adventure!